Monday, June 18, 2012

The old saying - If you don't use it you lose it - often describes the cognitive setbacks that many students experience over the summer months. Exercising children's brains with engaging and fun activities is a must. Here are 5 strategies you can use this summer to help your little ones sharpen and strengthen their skills.

When watching TV, discuss the commercials. See if they can figure out what product each commercial is promoting and see if they can uncover any inferences or hidden messages.

Play with anagrams - Write down a word that has at least 6 letters. In 5 minutes, see how many new words you can create by scrambling the letters.

Play catch with a football, baseball or beach ball. When you first toss the ball, call out a main idea such as days of the Week. When your child catches the ball, they have to say one of the days of the week. When they toss it back to you, you say another day of the week. Players can only say each detail once. If a detail is repeated, the player can't think of another detail, or there are no more detail options, that player loses the round. Keep score and play to 10. Other main ideas could be vegetables, types of dogs, forms of transportation, shapes, presidents and so on.

Read a short passage aloud to your child. Before you read it, explain that their job is to visualize or create a mental image of what you read to them in their mind. Once you have finished the passage, give them a blank piece of paper. Ask them to draw an image of what they saw.

Take a beach ball and on each color write a different part of speech: verb, noun, adjective, adverb, preposition, article and so forth. When you toss the beach ball back and forth to one another note where your right thumb lands on the ball. If your thumb lands on a verb, you have to say a verb. If your thumb lands on a adjective, you have to say an adjective. Each word can only be played once. The game continues until a player repeats a word or can not think of another option. You can play the same game by using figurative language terms such as metaphor, simile, onomatopoeia, assonance...

If you would prefer to purchase some workbooks that focus on language skills, Dr. Warren has a few products that you might like. Click on the following titles to learn more.

Sunday, June 17, 2012

As a learning specialist and educational therapist, I have
been overwhelmed with calls from parents claiming that their children struggle
with executive functioning. These
students are often described as lazy and unmotivated, and by the time that I
meet many of these students they also have a case of learned helplessness. Although executive functioning
weaknesses can manifest in different ways, the majority of my students find it
difficult to record assignments, organize their materials, turn in their
homework, pull out the salient information, focus in class and employ
meta-cognitive strategies.

Part of the problem is that we live in a society where we
are continually multitasking.It’s
almost impossible to find a quiet, distraction free spot where one can direct ones full attention to an undertaking.Instead our thoughts are continually diverted to the bleeps, jingles and
bings of text messages, phone calls, emails and so forth.Distractions that often make a 15
minute task become an hour long chore.What’s worse is that because attention is so sporadic, little is learned
from completing the process.

The other part of the problem is that education reform just
can’t keep up with the rapid changes. Schools are continually accommodating new technology without
the needed research and structured plan.As a result, executive functioning difficulties have become so prevalent
in schools because teachers now expect their students to be “executives,” yet
many schools do not allow them to use the personal technology that would help
them to succeed.Can you imagine
how a teacher would feel if you told them that they could not use their
personal smart phone or computer while at school?I do believe that this will change in the future, but at
present, many kids in this generation are suffering.The other
problem is that teachers each have their own unique plan and expectations.Therefore, there is little structure
across subjects.When I was in
school, all teachers communicated homework by writing it on the black board at
the beginning of class and they all prompted and collected our homework.Now, because teachers lie anywhere on
the continuum of technophobes to techno-geeks, they each have their own, often
contrasting, methods.

So what can we do?I believe that schools must:

1)Embrace technology, do the research, train the
staff, and define structured guidelines that can help to assure the proper use
technology.

2)Enforce a consistent plan for communicating and
collecting assignments for all teachers.

3)Hold teachers accountable to "practice what
they preach."They need to be
organized, plan projects, and return assignments in a reasonable amount of time.

4)Offer students a syllabus at the beginning of
each term. If high school, for
example, is trying to prep kids for college, why don't they give the students a
syllabus at the beginning of each term with all assignments and expectations
clearly documented.This would
also assure that teachers would get through the course content.

I would love to hear some of your ideas too.Change only comes from awareness and
communication.

Multisensory Multiplication and Division to Melodies CD - MMDM

Kangaroo Metric Conversions

College Essay Workshop

Eclectic Teaching Approach

Noodle the Noun Hound

Preppy the Preposition Penguin

Fraction Golf, Hockey and More

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